


armed with love and it's frustrations and grace, too

by AwayLaughing



Category: Charmed (TV)
Genre: Brothers, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Chris dies again I feel like I should just get that out there, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Time Travel, that's the death and it's not explicit but it's there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-16
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-06-08 17:13:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6865633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AwayLaughing/pseuds/AwayLaughing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris can be anything in the world he wants to be.</p><p>But he can never not be Wyatt's little brother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	armed with love and it's frustrations and grace, too

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like the character death archive warning doesn't apply but if you disagree hmu and I will add it.

Chris is seven, and he falls while playing a game of tag. He scrapes his knee and though he doesn't cry, Wyatt's at his side in a second.

 

“Let me see,” he says, with all the authority of a nine year old who hasn't _really_ seen the world and all it's horrors yet. Chris does, and frowns when his brother glows golden. Skin repairs, blood seeps back in and all that's left is the dirt on his knee. Until Wyatt wipes it off.

 

“Wy, isn't that personal gain?” Chris asks, and Wyatt shakes his head.

 

“No, I did it for you, not me,” Wyatt says and Chris very rarely argues with his big brother, and nods.

 

If he were to look back in reflection, years later, he'd realize something very simple.

 

Wyatt lied.

 

Chris is ten and sitting in his room, refusing to open it up for his mother. There's a chair stuffed under the doorknob, and he's already heard Wyatt say he's not fixing the door if mom blows it open. He heard mom say she didn't _need_ him to fix it, mister and knows Wyatt said something back, but not what.

 

Wyatt just orbs in anyway, five minutes after his argument with mom and Chris stares at him through puffy eyes and dares Wyatt to tease him about crying. Wyatt doesn't.

 

“You don't need dad,” Wyatt says instead, coming to sit beside Chris. Wyatt is bigger than Chris, because he's twelve and just hit a growth spurt and Chris slides toward him with the sudden weight. Chris grumbles as Wyatt wraps an arm around him, but twists to fit into the embrace properly all the same.

 

“You have dad,” he says and Wyatt rolls his eyes.

 

“Mom's better,” he says. “You're better. And you have me, I'm the best.”

 

“Nu uh,” Chris says, even though he does perk up.

 

“Uh huh,” Wyatt says, and starts to tickle him.

 

For now Chris's face runs with tears of laughter, not pain.

 

Chris is thirteen and stirring a pot on the stove while Wyatt sits at the table and bemoans fate and prophecy and everything else under the sun. He's gotten into another fight at school, Chris knows, and Gideon gave him a dressing down about how the Twice Blessed must hold himself to a higher standard than talking back to teachers.

 

“Well, at least you're not a cosmic accident,” Chris says, and Wyatt looks up so fast he thinks Wyatt may have broken his own neck.

 

“Don't say that,” Wyatt says, “you're not an accident. You're my brother, and better yet, you can be that and be anything you else you want, at the same time.”

 

“Except not be your brother,” Chris says, and quickly adds, “which is a good thing,” because he'd never, ever _not_ want to be Wyatt's brother. Even if Wyatt is more important, more powerful, more...everything good, Chris would never trade him for anyone else. “But what can I be? I'm not prophesied but demons don't really care. They'll attack anyway.”

 

“To get to me,” Wyatt's voice is soft, and he looks at the table, troubled. Chris bites back the response that not _everything_ about Chris is also about Wyatt, because the attack earlier was about Wyatt. The darklighters hadn't cared about Chris, hadn't cared they hit him until Wyatt killed them. “But I won't let them hurt you,” Wyatt says, “ever again. I'll protect you.”

 

“Great,” Chris says, forcing a smile, “and that means not trying to feed me. I got this.”

 

“I started the soup!” Wyatt says, indignant, and Chris grins wider.

 

“You managed to not burn water,” he says, and dodges the pen Wyatt flicks at him.

 

Chris is fourteen years and sixty one hours old, and he is at his mother's funeral. Wyatt is at his side, ignoring everyone and hugging Chris to him, and Chris is crying quietly into his shoulder. Leo's at Wyatt's other shoulder, face drawn and anguished, but Chris doesn't notice.

 

He cries the whole funeral. Aunt Paige, at one point, replaces Wyatt as his shoulder to cry on, Wyatt's too busy accepting everyone's apologies. A gentlehand lands on his shoulder and against hope, Chris looks for Leo. Instead he gets Darryl.

 

“It's okay to cry, kiddo,” he says softly and Chris hiccoughs and manages to speak almost normally.

 

“I-I have to try, for Wyatt,” he explains. Daryl's face, already so soft, goes softer and he squeezes Chris's shoulder.

 

“You're a good brother, Chris.”

 

Chris sees Wyatt, speaking to Leo, both backs turned to everyone, both tense, and promises to be a better brother than ever.

 

Chris is seventeen and everything is so wrong, wronger than he ever dreamed possible. A war rages on outside, and Chris is locked in the manor away from it all, but still he knows. He knows that this war has enveloped half of the US already, and is spreading like wildfire. Magic is already exposed, the cleaners have never appeared to negate it. Magic School is overcome, the students either dead or fighting. Heaven is silent, the underworld is empty.

 

And Wyatt is the reason.

 

Chris knows he shouldn't have ignored everything that happened, should have tried to step in when Wyatt's anger just kept growing. Should have cast a spell to keep him out of the house, away from the Nexus the first time he saw Wyatt speak to a demon and then let it go.

 

Should should should, but did not. Chris, the do nothing son once again. Leo would be so vindicated, if he were inclined to answer a call these days. Chris knows of course, it's possible Leo is dead. He and Wyatt had fought at mom's funeral, and Wyatt's rebuffed any contact since, but Chris selfishly prefers to think he's just abandoned them in favour of protecting Heaven, just like the rest of the surviving elders.

 

“Chris?” Wyatt's voice rings across the attic, stern and cool and something like knowing prickles across Chris's skin. He looks up from the book in time to see his brother walk in.

 

“Hey Wyatt,” he says, “haven't seen you in ages. You need a haircut dude.”

 

Wyatt's mouth twitches at that, and Chris takes the chance to turn the page, as if he's just flipping through and wasn't looking for something specific. “We have to talk, Chris,” Wyatt says and Chris nods and looks up again.

 

“Yeah, what about?”

 

Regret steals across Wyatt's face, and Chris's instincts scream that it's not real. “You need to leave the manor,” he says.

 

Chris is nineteen, and has not entered into his family home in two years and thirty nine days. He lives in a high rise with Wyatt now, has his own comfortable little apartment and his own less comfortable guards. Keepers, more like. Chris can't exactly _not_ read into the fact he can't orb out of his own house, but his brother and every Dick, Tom and Harry demon can orb or shimmer in no problem. He can leave, though it means people tailing him and sometimes he tries to lose them.

 

Sometimes it works, and Chris finds himself sitting in a park, alone, miles from the high rise. He doesn't expect to be alone long, of course, so when someone silently shimmers in, nothing but the slightest displacement of air giving them away, Chris is one the move, ducking and throwing himself forward.

 

No one expect Christopher Halliwell, brother to the Source himself, to tackle someone, which is what lets him get a hit in. She manages to flip them back over right away, but Chris isn't exactly a slouch, and has her spinning into the stone bench with a flick of his fingers and a snarl. She snarls right back, and ignores what must hurt, instead she manages to pin both arms, he narrows his eyes and the next thing he knows an athame is pointed right at one.

 

“You wouldn't,” he says, and her brown eyes flash at the challenge.

 

She doesn't lower her weapon, but she doesn't argue, either.

 

Chris is still nineteen, but only just. He has a small scar under his eye where Bianca made her point, seven months ago. She'd limped around for three days after that, and apologizes and Chris never asked her why, not with Wyatt seated at his dinning room table, watching.

 

Always watching, right up until he's not and whenever he's not Chris puts his plan into action, one tiny piece at a time. Bianca comes on side slowly, but surely, and it's her sitting in a small stone cell in the heart of the resistance's largest hidey hole. They don't know who they are, or they'd have slammed up some more wards.

 

“Are you sure about this, Chris?” Bianca asks as people hurry past them, casting furtive glances at them. The resistance has almost fallen to more than a few infiltrations, their screening process is flawed. Compassion and morals are difficult to balance against Wyatt's ruthless tyranny.

 

“No,” Chris says, because he's not certain of anything anymore. Not when the last thing he was certain of was Wyatt himself.

 

Bianca sighs and lets her head fall against the stone wall. Tense, ready to fight if need be, but also ready to trust. Chris almost envies her.

 

Chris is twenty two, and also not yet any age at all. He's standing in the room that one day will be his, watching his big brother as a baby chew on a stuffed duck. To replace the bear that got skewered last week. Wyatt is watching him back, curious but not untrusting, not since Leo's relaxed.

 

“I should kill you,” Chris says, knowing mo-Piper, won't hear. Chris doesn't want her to know, ever, what her sunny, golden boy has done. What either of them have done. Between them alone is shed blood, lies and manipulations. Between them and everyone else...is just more of the same, on a much larger scale. “I should,” he says again.

 

Wyatt just blinks and Chris tries to bury the knowledge that he won't.

 

“I shouldn't love you,” Chris says, and doesn't even bother burying the shame that he'll keep doing so.

 

Chris can be anything in the world he wants to be. Saviour, staller, tinkerer, spy, healer, killer, wanderer...anything.

 

But he can never not be Wyatt's little brother.

 

Chris is still twenty two and he is dying. And not in the obvious way, Wyatt's telekinesis wringing the oxygen from his blood. No, he's dying because until now Wyatt's never really, truly hurt him. Some tiny, idiot part of him believed Wyatt never would. He didn't even kill Bianca, after all. Or, hasn't yet. Chris realizes, in a second, that the world is young and anything can happen.

 

Even Wyatt killing him, which he's doing, even without actually doing it. And then he does it again, but Chris can admit it's not exactly on purpose. Or, will be able to eventually. For now he just leaps through the portal and ignores his brother's roar of angerpainregretangerwhoknows.

 

Ignores all his pain and all of _his_ pain and just promises the sisters the truth.

 

Never mind he'll bleed before he lets them know. Or at least, he thinks he will. Chris reminds himself, again to never be too certain.

 

Chris is twenty three by exactly one minute, and he is dying. He is dying and his big brother who is still a baby is crying. His father, who is much older than two is also crying, begging him to stay strong. To stay. Chris doesn't have the energy or breath to explain that he doesn't want to stay, not really, and can't even if he did want to.

 

So he tells his father to be strong, too. To stay. And then Chris is nothing.

 

Chris is seven, and he falls while playing a game of tag. He scrapes his knee and though he doesn't cry, Wyatt's at his side in a second.

 

“You okay?” he asks, peering down and Chris nods, Wyatt tugs him up all the same, leading him toward the house. “I could fix it, if you want.”

 

“That's personal gain, Wyatt,” Chris says, and Wyatt sighs and nods.

 

“Yeah I know,” he says, “I just don't like it when you're hurt is all. Come on, dad'll clean it up.”

 

“Kay,” Chris says, and keeps his hand in his brother's as they head back into the Manor.

**Author's Note:**

> It's some weird law that no matter how much I love the MCs of a story, I always divert to writing about side characters, and given I'm a sucker for complex relationships and time travel you get stuff like this.
> 
> the title is a reference to a song - Grace, Too by the Tragically Hip, though I changed the line a little.


End file.
